At St Elizabeth’s, the Foundation Stage or Reception year, is a child's first year in the school environment.  Children will experience a broad and balanced curriculum based on the seven areas of learning, which are underpinned by our Catholic identity and British Values.  Our aim is for the children to become independent and autonomous learners over the course of the Foundation Stage.

At St Elizabeth’s, we place great value on the development of children as individuals and providing them with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to prepare them for the challenges in KS1 and beyond. We aim to build strong foundations rooted in academic success as well as spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, which will enable our pupils to be active citizens of society and happy, curious life-long learners. 

Our curriculum is the cultural capital we know that our pupils need, to gain the knowledge, skills and understanding required for success.  We encourage our children to develop the right habits for learning through play and exploration, active learning and creative and critical thinking. 

To ensure children make outstanding progress in EYFS, we take into consideration each pupil's starting point and need.

Our EYFS curriculum aims to enable our children to be:

Competent and creative learners; who are curious about the world around them.

Secure and confident; who enjoy coming to school and learning new skills and knowledge building on their existing learning.

Skilful communicators; who connect with others through language and play, ensuring that they play in a vocabulary rich environment.

Our enabling environment and warm, skilful adult interactions, support the children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration.  The holistic curriculum maximises opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences, and offers children extended periods of play and sustained thinking, following their interests and ideas.  We value imagination and creativity, and seek to create a sense of enjoyment and fascination in learning, through a vibrant continuous indoor and outdoor provision, alongside visits which enhance learning.  Our investment in specialist teachers for Music and PE mean that children continually receive high quality teaching. 

It is our intent to ensure that all children will receive the teaching of early reading through systematic, synthetic phonics to learn to read words and simple sentences accurately by the end of Reception.